It doesnt help that PowerPoint itself has a truly horrible templating system. Try building a template from scratch and you'll see the ur-template has about 8 st

It doesnt help that PowerPoint itself has a truly horrible templating system. Try building a template from scratch and you'll see the ur-template has about 8 styles which are themselves very fragile and whose objects carry different degrees of semantic meaning. This is why, for example, it's stupidly difficult to take a deck produced in one template, paste it into another, and have the new template take effect across the copied slides. PowerPoint has quite a lot of deep features, and you'll prise it out of my cold dead hands, but the template system is a horror show.